New films from Canadian filmmakers Denys Arcand, Maxime Giroux, Jennifer Baichwal and Bruce Sweeney have been added to 2018 Toronto International Film Festival lineup, which announced its slate of Canadian films on Wednesday.

Nine of the films are directed by women, fsix are debut features and 14 are world premieres.

Canadian features will include Arcand’s “The Fall of the American Empire,” Giroux’s “The Great Darkened Days” and Sweeney’s “Kingsway.”

The Toronto festival also announced four Canadian actors and filmmakers who will participate in the TIFF Rising Stars program: Devery Jacobs, Lamar Johnson, Michaela Kurimsky and Jess Salgueiro. Salgueiro, Johnson and Kurimsky appear in the TIFF films “Mouthpiece,” “The Hate U Give” and “Firecrackers,” respectively, while Jacobs is an actor and filmmaker whose short film “Rae” won awards at shorts festivals.

It also revealed the six participants in the Telefilm Canada’s Pitch This! competition, and the 22 emerging filmmakers who have been chosen for the TIFF Filmmaker Lab, which this year will be headed by producer Cassian Elwes and Elizabeth Karlsen and directors Julie Dash and William Oldroyd.

In addition, TIFF announced two dozen Canadian shorts that will screen at the festival.

Steve Pond, awards editor at TheWrap, is also author of the L.A. Times bestseller The Big Show. He has been covering entertainment for more than two decades, and is the industry's most knowledgeable Academy Awards prognosticator.